Abstract
This paper is concerned with the language phenomena in Chinese that some nominal phrases as DPs with the default third person can refer to the speaker with the first person or the addressee with the second person. In English, such nominal phrases are called imposters (Collins & Postal 2012), which refer to the speaker or the addressee and keep the agreement with verbs in third person form when existing in the position of subject. However, unlike English, Chinese is lack of morphological forms to show the subject-verb agreement, and there is no grammatical person form, so the phenomenon of imposter is more popular in Chinese, especially in classic Chinese expressions. The paper, with many instances of such use, intends to interpret the reason why the Chinese nominal phrase in some context have the non-third person interpretation from both syntactic and semantic perspectives.
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An, F., Zhao, L., Cheng, G. (2016). A Study on the Referents of Chinese Imposters. In: Dong, M., Lin, J., Tang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10085. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_9
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